CHAPTER 3

 

Moon Month of Mannitt (late June–July), “Eggs”

Oil and Feathers Don’t Mix

TESHEKPUK LAKE, NATIONAL PETROLEUM RESERVE, ALASKA

 

This is amazing, I thought, and might have said, but it’s unlikely anyone aboard our single-engine Otter would have heard it.

Not our young pilot, who was chatting by radio with the next client on his work sheet. Not Bob Dittrick, who was peering out the copilot’s window, trying to juxtapose topographic features one thousand feet below with the ponds and rivers outlined on the deck of downloaded maps sitting on his lap.

Not Linda, who was busy shooting images of the Arctic Coastal Plain and Beaufort Sea beyond; nor the two young biologists, wedged in with our gear, who had bummed a ride out of Deadhorse to conduct breeding bird surveys at Lonely.

Lonely, by the way, is a place, not a state of mind.

The Otter, the Clydesdale of bush-flying aircraft, is one noisy piece of machinery. Even without the sound-dampening plugs wedged into our ears, utterances spoken with less volume than a shout commonly went unheard.

“Absolutely amazing,” I said or thought again, looking down at the green-brown carpet below that was tundra, and the overlying grid of pipes, petroleum transfer stations, and service roads that constitute the oil production fields of Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s North Slope—the source of about 6 percent of the petroleum produced in the United States, not to mention the annual dividend check given to every Alaskan resident.

You thought I was marveling at some extraordinary natural spectacle, didn’t you? No. I was referring to the colossal oil-extracting infrastructure, now more than thirty years in the making, that mantles the coastal plain west of Deadhorse, “Oil City,” Alaska. We’d been in the air almost forty minutes, and the capillary network of roads and pipes feeding the Trans Alaska Pipeline still dominated the landscape below.

It looked as if the tundra had been turned into a giant computer circuit board. It represented the work of tens of thousands of workers and billions of dollars and was incontrovertible evidence supporting not only the profitability of oil but the world’s dependence upon this energy-infused liquid as well.

No single engineering ambition that I have ever seen or read about compares with the transformed landscape below. Not the road system of Ancient Rome. Not the Suez Canal or the Great Wall of China. As the miles fell behind, as the scope of this landscape-altering endeavor unfolded below, these and other totems of human achievement diminished in significance and scale.

Am I castigating the oil industry? Hell no. How could anybody who grew up in a home heated with fuel oil, who commutes forty miles a day to and from work, and who was at that very moment ferrying himself and two accomplices, plus their 650 pounds of gear, out to a remote airstrip on the Beaufort Sea aboard a plane that is hardly known for its fuel efficiency possibly chastise the industry that I support (and depend upon) every time I pull up to the pump?

All I am doing is honestly acknowledging one of human civilization’s greatest feats of imagination, determination, and engineering. No other species could have come to one of the most remote and inhospitable corners of the world and so completely suborned such an ambition-defying landscape. If it was my privilege to award a medal to the single greatest engineering feat of the twentieth century, it wouldn’t be manned space flight, it would not be the telecommunications network, it would be Prudhoe Bay.

“We are an amazing species,” I thought or said to myself as we overflew the last of the pump relay stations and our plane approached the braided mudscape that is the Colville River Delta. The land below went from being a green-brown circuit board to being a green-brown polygonal landscape sparkling with lakes and ponds; most thawed, some still garnished with a core of winter ice; many supporting clustered flocks of waterfowl.

It is this preponderance of lakes, combined with the region’s untroubled remoteness and with the surfeit of nutrient-rich vegetation, that has made the Teshekpuk Lake region of Alaska’s Arctic Coastal Plain the sanctuary of choice for tens of thousands of geese during their post-breeding molt.

The problem is it’s not a sanctuary. While outside the boundary of the Prudhoe Bay Oil Field, the area we hoped to explore was nevertheless part of the 23.5-million-acre National Petroleum Reserve—the nation’s single largest publicly owned block of land. It was set aside by President Warren Harding in 1923 to meet the anticipated future fuel needs of what was, then, a petroleum-fueled navy, and, in 1976, jurisdiction was transferred by Congress to the Department of the Interior. During the Reagan administration, Congress authorized oil and gas leasing and development here.

But one portion of the reserve was still deemed too environmentally sensitive to allow development. This was the 1,734,000-acre Teshekpuk Lake Special Area, lying directly east of and adjacent to the oil fields of Prudhoe Bay. This environmentally sensitive area had already been whittled down by successive administrations to a core of 588,998 acres representing the very heart of the waterfowl molting and caribou calving grounds when, in January 2006, the U.S. Department of the Interior, under pressure from the George W. Bush administration, authorized oil and gas drilling. A coalition of environmental groups challenged the decision, and, in September 2006, the U.S. District Court for Alaska put lease efforts on hold pending additional public comment.

Our visit, in July 2007, put us smack in the middle of disputed wetlands and the controversy—between those who wanted to open the area to oil drilling and those who regard it as too biologically significant.

It is the story of the Arctic in a nutshell. Isolation versus intrusion, protection versus exploitation.

An hour later, with our pilot once again in the air and our hip-boot-shod biologist friends slogging south, Bob, Linda, and I were on the ground, sorting out gear beside the well-maintained gravel runway that once served Lonely, one of the network of DEW line radar sites that kept their watchful electronic eyes trained on the skies over the Arctic Icecap—Canada’s and the United States’s first line of defense against a Soviet transpolar attack.

Decommissioned at the end of the Cold War, the radar towers now serve as nest sites for ravens and rough-legged hawks; the abandoned and weathering buildings are infested with snow buntings who take to them the way bluebirds take to nest boxes.

“Been a while since I’ve put together one of these things,” Bob said, nodding toward the garbage-can-size sack containing the elements of our folding canoe.

“Unless that pack ice moves offshore, we’re not going to need to test your memory,” Linda said, nodding in the direction of the Beaufort Sea, the body of water that defines Alaska’s northern coast.

“Noticed that, huh?” Bob said, smiling even more broadly.

“Better than loading our boats, getting twenty miles away, and then having the ice come in and pin us to the beach,” I observed.

“Well,” said Bob. “You guys said you wanted an adventure. And there’s still plenty of time for that to happen, too.” This time he wasn’t smiling.

We pitched our tents on an invitingly flat stretch of tundra east of the runway. It wasn’t until the next morning that we realized the chosen substrate had once supported the fuel pipe running from the beach to the half dozen massive fuel tanks that served the radar station.

It takes a lot of oil to keep a string of prefab buildings warm when temperatures drop to forty and fifty below zero.

Further deduction led to the conclusion that the Dumpster-size, gravel-filled plastic bags stacked beside the runway were probably put there by the HAZMAT cleanup teams ordered in after base personnel were ordered out.

Did I mention that Lonely is a Superfund site? And if you are wondering why two residents of New Jersey would fly all the way to the Arctic to camp in a Superfund site (when we have, in our petroleum-refinery-rich corner of the planet, so many perfectly fine Superfund sites closer to home), read on.

Someplace You Have Never Been . . .

“Is there anyplace you’ve never been above the Arctic Circle?” I’d asked Bob way back when Linda and I were planning our adventure. “Someplace you’ve always wanted to go but couldn’t justify because you knew you couldn’t sell a trip or it was too expensive?”

There was a thoughtful silence over the phone while our friend pondered the question. Bob has been an Alaska resident for over thirty years and organizing backpacking, rafting, and kayaking trips for more than twenty of them. While Alaska is a big and spectacle-rich state, places Bob has not explored are getting harder to find.

Linda and I have done close to a dozen trips with Bob and his wife, Lisa. Backpacked out of the Brooks Range; rafted, kayaked, or canoed the Kongakut, Canning, Colville, and Pilgrim rivers. Sometimes as paying clients (at our insistence), other times as co-paying partners in trips organized for adventure and friends.

They know what they are doing, they know their state, and they’ve got great judgment and are able to make good risk assessments, on the spot, when things don’t go according to plan (and this is not the exception in wilderness travel).

“How about Teshekpuk,” Bob suggested. “It’s been in the news a lot lately. Bush wants to open it up to oil exploration, but it is a critical molting area for black brant and other geese. Even James Watt declared the area too sensitive for drilling,” he added, “and you know how environmentally sensitive he was.”

James Watt, a secretary of the interior under Ronald Reagan, was, during his tenure, pretty close to the environmental Antichrist in the circles I traveled in. For even Watt to close the area to oil exploration underscored an environmental significance.

“Ever since the decision was made to open Teshekpuk up in 2006, I’ve been thinking about getting up there and seeing it,” Bob explained.

“Never heard of it,” I confessed. “Is it near the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge?”

“No,” he confided. “It’s west of Prudhoe. In the National Petroleum Reserve.”

“Do we get there via the Colville?” I asked, trying to salvage a bit of dignity by indicating I knew that the largest river on the North Slope constitutes the southern and eastern boundary of the reserve.

“No,” he said. “It’s just in from the Beaufort Sea. We’ll have to fly in out of Barrow or Deadhorse, I guess. If that sounds like fun to you, I can do some investigation and find out when we’ll need to be there to see a bunch of geese near some landing strip. We’ll need permits, of course.”

It sounded like a fine plan. And it was mostly after Bob and Lisa’s busy rafting season. And as subjects go, it was smack on—an early-season biological marker demonstrating the rapidity of autumn in the Arctic. Breeding finished, bam! Time for geese to molt in new flight suits for the long journey south.

Plus, it incorporated the element of oil exploration and extraction—an unavoidable subject in the Arctic these days.

I had no idea that the trip would ultimately also incorporate elements of the Cold War and global warming. I further had no idea that our plan would be deemed so controversial that an effort would be made to prevent us from going.

By the oil companies? No. By people who care as much about birds and wildlife as Linda, Bob, and I do.

By a friend.

Our Man in Fairbanks

Ted Swem, of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, is a tall, curly-haired career biologist known for his puckish wit, uncommon intelligence, lateral thinking, dedication, knowledge, and outstanding margaritas.

He and Bob have been friends for decades. In fact, I met both of them at the same time: in Cape May, New Jersey, in 1976, when the three of us became colleagues and housemates in the inaugural year of the Cape May Bird Observatory. There weren’t a lot of margaritas consumed that year. We were, all of us, rat-poor journeymen raptor fanatics with lives and careers still ahead of us. Bob’s path led him to design and oversee natural history interpretation projects for the State of Alaska. I went on to become the director of the Cape May Bird Observatory. Ted joined the Fish and Wildlife Service, working in their Fairbanks office, where he now rides herd upon Alaska’s federally endangered species.

We’ve known each other a long time. Our respect for each other is immense. So Lisa’s e-mail advising us that Ted was strongly opposed to our trip was as much of a surprise as it was a matter of concern. Ted’s objection stemmed from the heightened sensitivity exhibited by geese during their molt. Any intrusion, he argued, was an unwarranted intrusion. The mere glimpse of a person coming over the horizon, according to Ted, was enough to send the birds charging across the tundra.

Note I said “charging,” not “flying,” and this distinction is central to the discussion.

The way most birds, most commonly, deal with a perceived threat is to fly away from it. As defensive strategies go, flying rates an evolutionary 9.5 but not a perfect 10.

A bird’s ability to fly is contingent upon a number of morphological refinements, all working in concert. These include a weight-reducing hollow superstructure, a superrich fuel mixture, a high-volume air-intake system, and a large muscular power train.

But key to this concept and design is a revolutionarily honed device called a “feather.” Basically superrefined scales that hark back to the reptilian ancestry of birds, feathers are marvelously light, marvelously strong, and multifunctional. They keep birds warm and dry, make them attractive or hard to see, and, best of all, some of these feathers are further refined to serve as airfoils. Laid in an overlapping plane along the length of a bird’s wing, they confer the ability to fly.

The problem is, feathers wear out. Flight feathers, especially for those species that fly habitually or migrate long distances, must be replaced, or molted, every year.

There are two ways in which birds accomplish this, two strategies. Some birds, like birds of prey, molt their important flight feathers gradually and synchronously—in other words, two at a time, same feather on each wing. It’s a little like overhauling an old sports car two parts at a time. The car’s always drivable. But, as with most old sports cars, repairs are never finished, and the car never looks or runs the way it did right out of the showroom.

The other strategy is to just do all the body work at once. Drop the old feathers and replace them with new ones over the course of several weeks. It means walking and swimming are going to take the place of flight for as long as the job takes (for most species a month or more). But it means that, once the molt is over, you’re back in tiptop form again. Able to fly great distances and escape predators with right-out-of-the-showroom ease.

For geese, the total overhaul (or complete molt) strategy makes good energetic and evolutionary sense. The time they choose to conduct their molt is biological downtime. Post-breeding, pre-migration. In the Arctic, this means late June into early August.

As birds that swim as well as walk, they are ambulatory enough to forage and escape most forms of danger.

What they require to make the strategy really work is a place that meets their needs while they are in the shop. Some-place where food is abundant, so they won’t have to travel far, and highly nutritious, because growing feathers requires quality material and energy conservation.

Most of all, the birds need security, a place where predators are few and intrusion minimal. Energy consumed avoiding a potential danger means less time feeding, and this translates to more downtime in the shop.

The area north and east of Teshekpuk meets and exceeds the requirements of molting geese. Two highly nutritional salt-tolerant plants, Hoppner’s sedge and creeping alka-ligrass, thrive in the region’s marshes. The multitude of large lakes provide a safe retreat to rest and roost. The relative scarcity of predators (including and, perhaps, most notably, humans) reduces risk while birds are most vulnerable.

Small wonder that as many as thirty-seven thousand brant (about one third of the West Coast population) and approximately thirty-five thousand greater white-fronted geese, whose next stop will be the Gulf Coastal states and Mexico, choose the Teshekpuk Lake Special Area to molt.

The region’s wealth of birds, and their sensitivity, has been recognized for decades. It is what prompted three secretaries of the interior—Cecil Andrus in 1977, James Watt in 1983, and Bruce Babbitt in 1998—to declare the most critical molting areas of the area off-limits to drilling.

It is also why Ted Swem was so concerned about our plans to go there. He polled two other biologists—but got a split decision. One agreed with Ted; one thought the impact would be minimal. The matter was ameliorated, if not settled, by outside arbitration. Lisa and Bob sought the counsel of Stan Senner, director of Audubon Alaska, who was, then, at the center of the legal efforts to reverse the decision to sell drilling permits in the Teshekpuk region. Stan did not consider our trip abusively intrusive. In fact, he was supportive of skilled outside observers going to the area and commenting on what they saw.

Me? I thought Ted was overreacting and maybe falling victim to the entitlement syndrome that occasionally grips researchers—i.e., that the intrusion visited upon wildlife by people doing research is sanctionable while intrusion by visitors and viewers (who gather impressions, not data) is not.

I was also confident that three more conscientious, wildlife-sensitive people than Linda, Bob, and myself could not possibly be found. Zero impact is an ethic Bob, and Wilderness Birding Adventures, champions. It was the ethic Linda taught at National Outdoor Leadership School.

And, heck, I work for the New Jersey Audubon Society! Ensuring the safety and integrity of birds and bird populations is what I do for a living. I’ve engaged lots of molting waterfowl in my time. I couldn’t see how anything we planned would disrupt the Teshekpuk birds in any way.

We weren’t dismissive of Ted’s arguments. In fact, we were even more sensitive to the geese, and their need for privacy, than we might ordinarily have been.

But we were also not dissuaded.

Lonely Misgivings

We woke that first morning at Lonely to the chatter of red-necked phalarope and the croaking of red-throated loon—a sound a bird might make if it were trying to sneeze and cough simultaneously.

Ra rah ra’harh

The ice-chilled winds, which had been moving thirty-four-degree air over our site the day before, had turned and moderated. Overnight, temperatures had climbed to a very comfortable forty-five degrees Fahrenheit.

Make that “while we slept.” There is no night at this latitude, in early July, because the sun never sets.

The offshore winds had also pushed the ice pack out to sea, opening a path for us. Our plan was to head east, hugging the coast, about twelve air miles, then nose our two-craft flotilla into a channel that, according to our topo maps, would carry us deep into the marshy lake region. Fish and Wildlife survey maps, secured by Bob, showed the area rife with molting birds—with brant numbers alone ranging up to seven-thousand on assorted lakes.

We did not plan to actually reach Teshekpuk Lake. The “Big Coastal Lake” as it translates from the Inupiat language, was still frozen and would remain so well into July. It was the area north and east of the lake that was the principal molting area. And waterfowl are not the only animals drawn to the solitude and security offered by the region.

“Olhmlyglod,” Linda managed to say through a mouthful of masticated cold cereal.

Five bull caribou went prancing by our camp, crossed the runway, and disappeared behind the gravel embankment. Linda’s reflexive reach for her camera was about an expletive slow.

“Hand me your binoculars, will’ya,” Bob encouraged. He trained the instrument on the horizon, the magnified image confirming what his eyes had detected and distance had tried to conceal.

“Lots of them out there,” he said. And there were. Fifty or sixty animals grazing just beyond the old radar installation; another twenty-five hundred moving like a pale brown tide along the distant horizon. Only a fraction of the forty-five thousand animals estimated to be in the Teshekpuk Lake herd but not a bad down payment on this, our first full day at Lonely.

If the camel is the ship of the desert, then the caribou is the ship of the Arctic. There are many differences between these two ungulates, but one thing they very much have in common. Both animals are superbly designed for their environments.

Caribou, Rangifer tarandus, is a member of the deer family whose other North American representatives include moose, elk, and white-tailed and mule deer. Falling between deer and moose in size, they are considered conspecific with the reindeer of Eurasia.

Their bodies are short and stocky to conserve body heat. Their legs are long to help the animals move through deep snow, and their long, dense coats protect the animals from winter cold (and summer insects). Unlike other North American ungulates, both males and females have antlers.

Impressive? Absolutely. Attractive? Not particularly. In fact, their short-muzzled faces (another adaptation to cold environments) give the animals a mulelike character. But what they lack in terms of one-on-one winsomeness, they more than make up for in numbers, because caribou are the most numerous large mammal of the Arctic.

Split into four subspecies, divided into multiple herds, more than 3 million caribou range across the North American Arctic and adjacent boreal forest. The most nomadic of these are the Barren Ground caribou, whose annual peregrina-tions may cover thousands of miles. In winter, the great herds retreat into the northern edge of the boreal forest. In early spring, with snow still deep on the ground, they range onto open tundra, where females drop their calves. The migrations to and from the breeding grounds are among the most celebrated animal movements on the planet.

Many of the Arctic’s aboriginal people molded their movements and cultures around caribou, becoming nomads who followed the herds. Arctic wolves are virtually caribou obligates, and in some regions breeding success, or failure, hinges upon the capricious wanderings of the herds. No book treating the Arctic is complete without discussion of this animal, and no photographer visiting the Arctic does not dream of being surrounded by streams of these rack-bearing ungulates.

Having missed her shot, Linda started scanning the horizon, picking up small bands and studying their routes.

I knew what she was thinking. Better caribou in the hand than brant in the bush. Wildlife photographers learn to strike while the iron is hot. The most expensive and sophisticated cameras on earth don’t come with temporal adjustment settings. You can’t set them forward to capture tomorrow’s great images; you can’t set them back to nail the caribou that just ran by. If caribou is the hand the Arctic is dealing today, then caribou, at close range, in gorgeous sunlight is what 500-millimeter lenses (and photographers) should be focusing on right now!

But today was a travel day. And the Arctic is as parsimonious with good travel days as she is with great photo ops. If we wanted to get to the birds, which were the focus of our trip, the caribou would have to wait.

It took the better part of the morning to bang the boats together. Several more hours to apportion and load our gear. Subsequent days would go more quickly, easily. There would be ample time to study and savor the many birds and animals that we were, by necessity, forced to turn a blind eye (and capped lens) to, today.

At lunch, six more caribou ambled by, down the beach, heads high, antlers back, eyes wide, and expressions semi-crazed. An hour later we were in our boats, paddling east. Five hours later, arms aching, and not particularly encouraged by the condition of the shore ahead, we decided to make camp on a bluff designated by the name Kokruagarok on Bob’s map. We’d traveled slightly less than four miles, making not even one mile per hour.

No, the ice conditions were fine. It was the tide, the waves, and the headwinds that killed us.

Meltdown I

We headed for the Kokruagarok bluffs and the quarter-moon-shaped gravel beach, encouraged by the prospect of landing, getting out of the boats, and uncramping our legs. Five hours is a long time to sit with your legs contoured around gear. The snap-down cover on our canoe, intended, literally, to make the craft “seaworthy” (i.e., able to shed waves in open water), wasn’t designed with long-legged fifty-six-year-old bird watchers in mind.

Or, more specifically, goose watchers.

“Aren’t those geese ahead of us?” Linda directed.

I trained my binoculars on the animate mass of birds hauling themselves out of the water and onto the beach.

“Brant?” she asked.

“No . . . Canadas I think. Hey, Bob, geese on the beach.”

Bob, slightly ahead and more than slightly hard of hearing (for this Ted Nugent and the Rolling Stones, played at cranked amplification, share equal credit), didn’t hear me, but he’d seen the birds, too.

About two hundred molting Canada geese, judging by their massed ranks and coordinated movement, had suddenly elected to find a less contested place. What this means is that the birds were charging up the bank.

“We’re still five hundred yards from shore,” I gauged. “They can’t be reacting to us.”

And I cannot say, with absolute certainty, that the birds were reacting to our appearance. Or that the beach, which was covered in nodular goose droppings and shed feathers, both old and new, was a favorite lounging area for molting birds (so one that they would be disinclined to abandon). All I can tell you, empirically speaking, is this:

That two hundred flightless geese very abruptly and for no (other) apparent reason suddenly vacated a favored beach by charging, en masse, up and over the hill.

That after landing, when we climbed to the top of the hill and scanned around, they (or another flock numbering two hundred Canada geese) were about a mile away and still running in a direction that led directly away from us.

That for the thirteen hours we remained on that stretch of beach, the birds never returned, and none of the groups of birds flying and swimming past took their place.

What I can say is that, at that point, a little voice inside my head whispered this possibility: Ted was right. Molting geese are off-the-chart spooky here.

On the other hand, for the pair of Arctic foxes whose den was on the bluff, not only was retreat not an option but it seemed not even to be on their minds. Nor, for that matter, was it on the mind of the greater white-fronted goose who was incubating her clutch of eggs beside a small pond not far from where we pitched our tents.

In fact, neither the foxes—one piebald animal, one black one—nor the geese paid much attention to us at all. They were much more fixated on each other and the eggs that were at stake. The nonchalance of many Arctic birds and mammals in the face of human intrusion is something I have marveled at on previous visits. It made the reaction of the geese even more startling and dramatic.

I figured my photographer wife would be delighted by the proximity of animals, but I was wrong.

“You could probably get some good shots of those foxes,” I encouraged Linda, who was facing away and, curiously, in the process of stowing her camera gear.

“I tried,” she said, to her pack, not me. “The fog came in and the light’s gone.”

I don’t know how I knew she was crying, but I did. And I was almost as perplexed by this as I was by the retreat of the geese.

“What’s the matter?” I asked in the tone that husbands use upon discovering that their wives are upset by something that has completely escaped their notice.

“Are you upset because we spooked the geese?”

She shook her head no.

“Don’t you like the campsite?”

No, again.

There ensued one of those pregnant pauses during which wives weigh the perennial alternatives—swallow your frustration or throw it out on the table—and husbands stare, un-breathing and unblinking, at the swords that have suddenly and unexpectedly appeared above their heads and wonder about the tensile strength of a thread.

“I don’t want this to be another trip where all we do is travel and there’s no time to photograph,” she said, once again, to her camera pack. Then she turned, and I noticed first the fog that was beading on her hair and then the tear streaks down both cheeks.

“I know this chapter is about geese, but I could have had some great shots of caribou this morning. This book involves me, too, and I can’t get any kind of shot if all we do is keep moving around and chasing story lines.”

She was right, of course. Writers are always pursuing story lines, so want always to be on the move. Photographers need time to set up shots, let the forces of the universe—light, angle, background, animation, proximity, perception, composition, and, of course, luck—come to bear. If we wanted good photos, we couldn’t keep running away from opportunities.

“It’s only the second day,” I soothed.

“I’ve seen the route. I know how far we traveled today. At this rate, we’ll be in our boats for the entire trip.”

“We’ll change the route,” I said. “Take advantage of what we see. Let’s talk to Bob.”

Which we did. And he agreed. But as things turned out, we could easily have saved ourselves the discussion, because the Arctic herself had decided to arbitrate the matter independently. There were forces at play that would change not only our timetable and route but the “story line” of this chapter (not to mention the face of the planet). We got our first inkling of this script change the next morning.

Meltdown II

We got off early by Arctic standards (midmorning). The foxes were probably not unhappy to see us off. The greater white-fronted goose? Hard to say. Our presence may have daunted a predator or two.

We rounded the tip of Kokruagarok and came face-to-face with not only the expected headwind but a wall of ice.

No. Not the pack ice moving back onshore. It was the shore. The waters of the Beaufort Sea were lapping at a wall of ice. A fifteen-foot wall of permafrost exposed by wave action, the ice that underlies the Arctic, was naked to the sun. The overlying cap of tundra was coming off in peaty chunks, and water that had not been liquid for thousands of years was running in rivulets into the sea. The Arctic was disappearing in front of our eyes.

From a geologic standpoint, it would hardly be more shocking if the Sahara suddenly put forth springs or the Mediterranean Sea went dry. In fact, what is happening in the Arctic right now, as a result of climate change, will be far more consequential than either of these imagined comparisons. And while the changes will come first, and perhaps most dramatically, to the Arctic, they most certainly will not end here.

Still fighting a headwind, we made poor time, traveling less than three miles by lunch; we landed our boats on a tiny island that seemed not to appear on Bob’s map.

“According to my GPS,” he announced, “We’re half a mile inland.”

“So half a mile of coastline has disappeared since those GPS coordinates were logged?” I asked.

“Seems like,” he said. “I also haven’t seen too many places where we can land and camp. This coast is all blown out.

“You know,” he added, “when we were flying in, I was having a hard time squaring what I could see from the air with my map. Now I know why. There’ve been a lot of changes.”

Because of the wind, because of the lateness of the day, because of the uncertainty of the crossing ahead, we decided to turn south short of our destination, into Pogik Bay, reasoning that the islands at the mouth of the bay might have buffered the shore somewhat from erosion, hoping that we could locate some higher ground that would serve as a camp.

Fortunately, we did. We found an elevated berm about a mile from the mouth of the bay, which was being guarded by a male peregrine (who flew) and ten feet of peaty shoreline muck, much of which accompanied us to our campsite. It wasn’t the most aesthetically pleasing wilderness campsite I’ve ever found. Surrounded, as it was, by rusting and half-buried fifty-five-gallon drums and the sun-rotted remains of the big white plastic X-marks-the-spot aircraft marker that notes the location of “U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey Triangulation Station Bunny 1951.”

But it was elevated. There were flat spots large enough to accommodate tents. The view of the bay and the surrounding flats was excellent. What’s more, the sky, which had been overcast, was clearing. Best of all, the afternoon temperature had climbed to a balmy sixty degrees Fahrenheit and there were, as yet, no mosquitoes.

It was then that we decided to push no farther in our boats. Supporting this decision were the thousand or so brant and Canada geese visible in the bay, bolstered by six yellow-billed loons, a snowy owl sitting on a distant hummock, and about ten thousand caribou moving along the horizon.

It looked like Linda might get a photo or two out of the deal after all.

The brant, our first sizable concentration, were about a half mile away and, while plainly aware of our intrusion, not panicked. The fact that they had a whole big bay to escape into probably had much to do with this, and, as we moved our gear to higher ground, they made use of that space by swimming, about a mile farther south.

It looked like shots of brant would not be among those photos.

The Double Whammy—Geese in the Crossfire

When I envisioned a book about the Arctic, I truly hoped not to spill much ink on the subject of global warming. I’m not a climatologist. The Arctic is an anthology of stories waiting to be told—most of them more feel-good than climate change.

But like the phenomenon itself, there is no avoiding the subject. Just as its impact on the coast changed our plans and the focus of this chapter, its long-term effects seem destined to change the Arctic.

Still I am, even now, reluctant to completely change my original focus, which was to discuss the challenge presented by the need to meet our species’ energy needs without undermining the wildlife resources we cherish. So I’ve decided to expand, more than shift, the discussion. To focus on the challenges posed by our species’s dependence upon fossil fuels first from the front, then from the back end.

How the drilling for oil affects life in the Arctic. How the burning of it does, too. Beginning this discussion at the beginning or . . .

Have you ever wondered how all this oil got lodged under the Arctic in the first place? Even more fundamentally, have you ever wondered what oil is? Why it does what it does (including things we don’t want it to do)?

Believe it or not, it begins with sunlight.

Oh, Say Can You C

For many years I labored under the misapprehension that oil was essence of melted dinosaur. I trace this misconception to the 1964 New York World’s Fair, where I was first exposed to the Sinclair Oil Corporation, whose Dinoland exhibit got top honors in my thirteen-year-old esteem, and whose company logo featured a large green brontosaurus.

Essence of dead dinosaur, and other large prehistoric animals, may figure in some small portion of the earth’s petroleum deposits. But the bulk of this energy-packed syrup comes from a group of organisms found much lower on the food pyramid—in fact, just about at the bottom. Most of the earth’s crude oil was at one time the algae and zooplankton that flourished in ancient lakes and seas. Mixed with and buried beneath sediment, transmuted by heat and pressure, the reconstituted detritus ultimately worked its way closer to the surface, where it waited for some clever creature to come along and release the magic trapped within it.

Energy. Forged in the bowels of the sun. The source of most of the energy found on Earth and a key element in the alchemy of almost all living things. Through an extraordinary process called “photosynthesis,” plants are able to harvest inorganic carbon atoms from water (and air) and suborn the energy of sunlight to bind these carbon atoms in long, stable chains that are the building blocks of carbohydrates. The plants ultimately die, but the energy bound in the links of carbon chains survives, providing the chains’ demise finds, or soon places them in, an anaerobic environment, like a silted seabed. Introduced to oxygen, the carbon atoms break their bonds to one another and link up with this attractive new element, forming, among other things, carbon dioxide.

The crude oil lying beneath Alaska’s North Slope began as an amalgam of small living things, moving about in, then dying and falling into the sediment of, a shallow sea that covered northern Alaska hundreds of millions of years ago. Then, about 180 million years ago, the Pacific continental plate began overriding the American plate. One of the things this did was create the Brooks Range. Another thing it did was bury the ancient seabed, subjecting the organic slurry that had accumulated on the bottom to intense pressure and heat for millions of years. The result: about 25 billion barrels of energy-impregnated liquid trapped in pools lying beneath what would become, in time, a complex tundra biome known as the North Slope and the bottom of the Beaufort Sea.

Our species’s use of oil as a source of light goes back mere hundreds of years and involves multiple civilizations. But it wasn’t until the mid–nineteenth century, when the process of distilling it to make kerosene was discovered, that oil became an essential ingredient of “modern” life, first as a source of fuel for lamps (which was good news for whales, whose blubber was similarly rich in combustible carbon chains and who were being slaughtered to satisfy the human demand for oil). But it was the development and proliferation of the internal combustion engine that has fueled a demand for oil. A world wide demand that has now reached 850 million barrels per day, with no slackening in sight.

A demand so great that recovering oil in places as remote and technically challenging as the Arctic is now well within economic reach. Places whose environmental integrity has, until now, been minimally affected by our species.

The ongoing extraction of oil from the earth is not, in itself, necessarily a problem for Arctic wildlife. Yes, there is the danger or leaks or spills (such as the March 2006 Alaska Pipeline rupture), but these are not common, which is good, because the damage caused by spills in the Arctic environment is difficult to redress. The greatest short-term threat to wildlife in general, and to the molting geese and calving caribou of the Teshekpuk in particular, is the impact of development—compounded disruptions posed by thousands of workers, multiple vehicles, and persistent air traffic going on for years. If the appearance of two small nonmotorized boats and their occupants can send geese stampeding for the horizon, imagine the impact on geese caused by steady air traffic and round-the-clock human activity at every compass point.

The other major problem is the long-term impact of dropping a man-made infrastructure atop a fragile, natural one. Natural, elevated structures that support the nests of cliff-nesting predators such as ravens and raptors are rare in the low, flat, treeless reaches of the coastal plain.

The cliffs flanking the Colville River, more than a hundred miles to the south, support one of the highest densities of nesting raptors in the Arctic—golden eagles, peregrines, gyrfalcons, rough-legged hawks, and common ravens (functional raptors). On our trip we found one family of ravens and one family of peregrines, both nesting on the abandoned structures at Lonely.

When humans build a tower, or a building, they open the door to birds that eat other birds. One of the reasons geese choose to enjoy their flightless days on the Teshekpuk (and not the Colville) is precisely the low density of aerial predators.

Humans also attract and support predators with their waste. Gulls, foxes, and bears are all drawn to landfills. This unnatural resource increases their populations by increasing their breeding success and survival rate (i.e., helping predators get through the lean times that are among nature’s principal pruning mechanisms).

But these are just the front-end impacts that oil exploration and development would have on the Teshekpuk. It’s the long-term consequences of our species’s dependence upon oil that will, ultimately, prove more challenging to the Arctic and its wildlife. We’d already seen some of those changes. We were about to encounter more.

Releasing The Genie

“Pah,” I said, giving force to, and pronouncement upon, the filtered water I’d just taken into my mouth. “This one’s brackish, too.”

“Looks better inland,” Bob noted, nodding west. “Little higher. We’ll find drinkable water there, I’ll bet.”

It was a new experience for me. In my many trips into the Arctic, I’d rarely had trouble finding potable water. In summer, across much of the Arctic, you are literally standing in it. The mass of low-lying plants and peaty matter below is like a supersaturated sponge. The underlying permafrost prevents surface water from percolating away. The insulating mat of flowers, moss, and lichen retards evaporation.

Despite annual rainfall levels of fewer than ten inches a year, much of the coastal plain is semiaquatic. It’s one of the reasons the Arctic enjoys a superabundance of mosquitoes during the warmer months. It’s also the reason most oil exploration and extraction activity occurs during winter. The damage done to the fragile tundra surface is diminished when vehicles aren’t churning up the surface and dormant plants are protected by a layer of snow.

The three of us were poised on the edge of a tundra polygon, a very common formation on sparsely vegetated tundra caused by perpetual freezing and thawing. Seen from the air, polygonal tundra looks like a patchwork quilt or a jigsaw puzzle composed of multisided geometric forms.

If you can remember back to the time when you made a cross section of an onion and looked at it under a microscope, take that microscopic image of straight-sided plant cells and superimpose it over the Arctic plain. In fact, the comparison of plant cells and polygon formations can go even further. The foot-high embankments that form the borders of the polygons are much like the structurally hard cell walls of plants. They hold ground water in the way cell walls surround and support the rich broth of life within.

What’s fascinating about polygons is the extraordinary diversity in plants and animals they support—micro universes within the macro tundra.

The elevated banks support plants suited for a dry environment (despite their proximity to water). They serve as nesting places for tundra birds. Support runways for lemmings. Provide elevated perches for anything that wants a heads-up over the Arctic—jaegers searching for prey, breeding dunlin aspiring not to become prey.

Commonly, the centers of polygons hold standing water—shallow ponds brimming with newly emerged insect life. They host nesting phalaropes and provide avenues of retreat for young.

Between the dry, highland borders and aquatic interior there is, depending upon elevation and drainage, a measure of marsh and bog supporting another array of plants and animals.

Imagine. An entire Arctic environment housed in a formation the size of a two- or three-car garage. Multiply this by a few million polygonal building lots. Add a few big lakes and a wealth of smaller ones, a few well-drained higher areas, a meandering stream or two, and lots of open space, and you’ve got the Teshekpuk.

Or at least you had the Teshekpuk. What Bob, Linda, and I were discovering was the impact of an environmental shift that was, literally, changing the face of the tundra. An encroaching intrusion of salt water from the Beaufort Sea.

We were, now, almost two miles from camp, and the water in the lakes and polygonal pools was still brackish. The tidal inundation of this low and vulnerable coastline was an ecological game changer. It was the reason Bob had so much difficulty squaring what he could see from the air with the features on his topographic map. It was why the area around our camp was so vegetatively impoverished. Dry, dusty; largely devoid of living things.

The absence of buffering winter ice was leaving the shoreline unprotected from flooding and wave action. The impact of rising sea levels on all the world’s low-lying coastal areas was threatening the low-lying Teshekpuk, too.

This dramatic habitat alteration has been linked to environmental changes associated with the back end of our species’s oil addiction or, more explicitly, its exhaust.

It is unlikely that a person exists who has not been made aware of the global concern about climate change and the multiple impacts rising temperatures are going to have upon the planet. Anyone so apprised must also know that thermal-blanketing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, resulting from the burning of fossil fuels, are widely held to be responsible for the rapid rise in temperature worldwide.

What you may not know is that the impact of global warming is most pronounced in the Arctic, where average temperatures have risen at a rate two times greater than the world average. The rate of change, as measured by the shrinkage of the Arctic icecap, already exceeds what was, just a few years ago, considered the worst-case scenario. Even if humans stopped adding to the earth’s existing blanket of greenhouse gases, the warming process is, likely, already self-sustaining. The genie is out of the bottle. The Arctic, it turns out, is a great big carbon-dioxide-trapping bottle. We’ve already pulled the cork.

Let’s return, for a moment, to that carbon chain. The one forged from plants by welding carbon atom to carbon atom using the energy of sunlight. Remember I said that the foundation of oil is organic matter that has settled in an anaerobic, or oxygen-deprived, place? Carbon atoms readily bond with oxygen atoms, and, given half a chance, they will. The process is called “oxidation” or “combustion.” The result is most commonly a new compound called “carbon dioxide” and the re-lease of the pent-up energy that was being stored.

Of course, all we were interested in was the energy. The carbon dioxide byproduct of combustion, which has been accumulating in the atmosphere, was pretty much ignored until it was implicated as one of the primary causal agents of climate change. The burning of fossil fuel is not, of course, the only source of carbon being emitted into the atmosphere. Heck, you add to the carbon footprint with every breath you exhale, every crackling blaze in your fireplace. Every forest or grass fire releases the magic that is energy and the evil genie that is carbon dioxide into the air.

Carbon is stored in many vaults within the earth, not just coal and oil (in fact, much of the earth’s carbon is dissolved in the oceans), but one of those vaults, it turns out, is the permafrost that underlies the tundra. More than two thousand feet deep in places, this enduring cold-storage bin has been holding an estimated 14 percent of the world’s carbon in cold suspension for about thirty thousand years. There is mounting evidence that the permafrost layer is already warming and melting, not just along the edges, as Linda, Bob, and I witnessed, but in the upper stratum of the interior—a stratum that underlies, and literally supports, most of the Arctic, including much of Alaska. This meltdown is not only releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere (accelerating global warming) but also releasing water into the world’s oceans, which will add to rising sea levels.

The melting of the Arctic icecap, it turns out, will not influence ocean water levels. The volume contraction resulting from ocean ice being converted to water will balance the volume of water being added as the ice melts. However, the volume of water derived from terrestrial sources—melting glaciers on Greenland and melting permafrost—will very definitely contribute to rising sea levels.

At current estimates, sea levels are expected to rise twenty inches by the year 2100 (with upper estimates closer to thirty). By that time, most of the Teshekpuk will have eroded back into the sea, and future battles for oil, should our species still want the stuff, will be focused upon securing offshore drilling rights.

And the brant, who fly here every year for the security they require during their most vulnerable period? Good question.

Boil of Geese

About four miles from camp (almost halfway back to Lonely), we decided to have lunch on a section of tundra still elevated above the reach of tides. It was wet, of course, but freshwater wet. We settled on one of the walls of a particularly well fortified polygon (which had also won the favor of a pair of po-marine jaegers) and broke into our packs—exhuming all the standard edibles of a Wilderness Birding Adventures picnic.

The jaegers, pirate princes of the coastal plain, watched our every move—for both threat and opportunity. We didn’t pose much of a threat. Clearly the large, black-capped, charcoal brown birds had a nest nearby, and, being responsible, we didn’t want to stress them.

But we did present an opportunity. The Teshekpuk region, that year, was rich in lemmings; as rich as Bylot Island was not. Every one of these tailless rodents that our antics sent scampering was one less that a jaeger had to find on its own (and we dislodged many).

“Gotcha,” Bob announced, throwing his Wilderness Birding Adventures cap (and half of his six-foot, three-inch frame) flat across the tundra.

“Missed ‘im,” Linda corrected, betting on the survival-honed quickness of lemmings and the age-dampened reflexes of Bob. “Pass the peanut butter, please.”

“What were you going to do if you caught him?” I asked, helping myself to a wedge of smoked salmon to accompany the cream-cheese-laden bagel in my hand.

“Add him to tonight’s chili,” Bob rejoindered, after recovering his poise (if not his pride). Returning his lemmingless hat to his head. Reaching for and offering the requested peanut butter. Pausing long enough to remove a smoked sausage from the pack and reduce it to bite-size pieces with his belt knife.

It was just about this time that we heard the hum of a distant aircraft and found it, too. A single-engine Piper Cub, flying low and slow over the eastern horizon, surveying the territory east of Pogik Bay.

“Must be the Fish and Wildlife survey team doing their waterfowl count,” Bob assessed, and this seemed to be so. For half an hour, we watched the plane patrol in ever-closing sweeps—an aerial harrier, flying a search pattern over waterfowl-bearing lakes. It wasn’t close enough to be intrusive. Three miles at least, probably more.

That’s why the boil of geese, charging over the horizon and heading straight for us, seemed at first unrelated to the plane. But it was clear that the birds were fleeing from something, and as the mass drew closer, and nothing else appeared, we were led to conclude that the flightless birds were, indeed, reacting to the survey plane.

A single plane, flying a search pattern that would not even intercept the geese, was enough to prompt the birds to retreat, at a dead run. I don’t know how far they had run before we spotted them. But they crossed at least a mile while we watched, never slackening their pace. It seemed like they were set to run right over us, a prospect that did not sit well with the jaeger.

When the geese were about two hundred yards out, the jaeger took wing, flew directly at the mass of birds, and, singling out one member of the flock, pinned it to the ground and proceeded to rip feathers from its neck.

A greater white-fronted goose is a sizable bird—at four and a half pounds, almost four times the weight of the jaeger. But the goose was completely mastered, and after ten punishing seconds the jaeger lifted off, returning to his perch. The geese, recovering from the attack, regrouped and resumed their original course.

Realizing that the geese seemed not to have gotten the message, once more the jaeger took wing. Selected another member of the flock. Subjected this individual to the same foot-pummeling, feather-ripping punishment doled out to the first bird.

This time, the geese seemed to get it. They altered course, veering north, passing wide of us. The jaeger returned to his sentinel perch as if nothing unusual had happened.

The geese were still heading for the horizon when we packed up lunch and continued on. I have no way of knowing whether the birds did or did not figure in this year’s census, but one thing I can tell you: everything Ted said about the hypersensitivity of molting geese appeared to be not only true but understated.

We spent four nights at Bunny. The weather remained fair but windy. Windy enough for me to conclude that the reason mosquitoes were not more in evidence was that, if they tried to launch themselves, they’d get their wings blown off. Windy enough that the fine, organic dust left in the wake of the tidally blown-out coast became an integral part of our diet, sleeping quarters, and the air we breathed. When the fog rolled in, it turned to aerosol goo.

With the wind to our backs, the return trip to Lonely took less than a day—which was fortunate. The morning after our return, the wind shifted back to the north and the pack ice snugged back up against the coast. Had we lingered at Bunny, we would have been there awhile, trapped between ice and a blown-out coast.

Tide of Battle

Breathing hard, I used my newly heightened archaeological interest as an excuse to catch my breath.

“Two-mile walk, my foot,” I said, looking back toward the Lonely DEW line station, shimmering to the east. “I hope the guy counts geese better than he estimates distance.”

The guy, by the way, was a young waterfowl biologist working for the U.S. Geological Survey, named Keith, whom we found bivouacked at Lonely upon our return. He and another biologist were engaged in a six-week effort to get a handle on the number of geese using the Teshekpuk region. It was their survey plane we’d seen.

Over a generously offered, and gratefully accepted, mug of fresh-pressed coffee, he asked whether I’d “hiked over to the ruins down the beach yet.” An old “whaling station,” he speculated.

“About how far?” I asked.

“Two miles,” he said, casually.

I accepted this estimate at face value. Putting more stock in his earnest brown eyes than in his wiry frame. “Two miles” to a field-fit, thirty-year-old biologist translates to four miles to an out-of-shape, fifty-six-year-old bird observatory director (and to the measurement standards accepted by the rest of the world, too, I might add). Still, it’s hard to think ill of someone who hands you a mug of semiexcellent French roast coffee five hundred miles from the nearest espresso bar (and the truth is, I would have visited the ruins anyway).

Keith’s lair was one of the outlying sheds that served the Lonely complex. Several more decommissioned buildings were being used by the Husky Oil Company. Their posted signs were much in evidence, and, curiously enough, those same signs, bearing the Husky Oil, NPR Operations, Inc. brand were posted around the hilltop ruins in front of me along with the admonishment DO NOT DISTURB. ARCHEOLOGICAL SITE. Husky Oil’s jurisdiction within the National Petroleum Reserve was, evidently, broad based.

“Do not disturb” is not in semantic essence the same as “No trespassing,” so I finished my climb. Set my back against a crumbling structure to enjoy the solitude and the view. The structure, an old sod-walled outhouse, had been recently appropriated by a nesting pair of snowy owls if the surfeit of pellets lying about was any clue.

The view of the ice-choked Beaufort Sea, the mud flats to the west, and the pond-pocked tundra to the south was magnificent. Lonely, almost dead east, rippled like an illusion. The owls sure knew how to pick their lookout points.

I wondered how many thousands of Native hunters had stood on this same hilltop for the same reason. I wondered about structures on the site. Six (or so) slat-sided and sod-reinforced buildings, only one that deserved to be called “standing.” Several paces north were two wooden dories whose derelict keels were welded to the tundra by moss and lichen. An owl pellet’s toss to the south, a frost-shattered mound sprouted splintered coffins and human remains.

I learned later, from a 1982 report filed by Edwin S. Hall Jr. of the U.S. Geological Survey, that the graves had been inadvertently exposed by Husky Oil crews in the late 1970s. The report identified the site, and buildings, as a former trapping and trading center and noted its location as about “one hundred yards from the coast.”

At the time of my visit, the coast was less than fifty feet away. Half of the smaller of the two dories, identified in the report as “whaleboats,” projected over the edge of the eroded cliff. Another part of Alaska’s cultural heritage, it seemed, was about to wash away.

Chewee?

I looked up to see one of the millions of snow buntings that enliven the Arctic landscape looking down on me. The bird seemed puzzled, but not troubled, by my intrusion. Like the many snow buntings that had made themselves at home in the ruins of Lonely, this bird was taking advantage of the habitat-altering opportunities left by members of our species.

Snow buntings are cavity nesters. They fit their feather-lined nests in whatever protective nooks and crannies they can find, so the abandoned radar site offered a surfeit of prime man-made nest sites. Every warping board, every pile of crates bought and paid for by taxpayer money or oil-company profits constitutes prime nesting real estate for snow buntings.

Of course I explored Lonely. What child of the Cold War could resist the temptation to see, firsthand, one of the celebrated outposts that protected us from communism?

As anyone growing up in the post–World War II era knows, the surrender of Germany and Japan did not usher in an era of peace. Instead, the conflict shifted and went underground as the war’s two most powerful victors, the United States and the Soviet Union, squared off in a protracted game of ideological and political chicken. The stakes were high. Both sides had nuclear weapons and delivery systems capable of annihilating their adversaries (not to mention life on Earth). What’s more, the political and economic systems of both nations quickly became enmeshed in and nurtured by the conflict. Or don’t you remember President Dwight David Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex” speech?

Neither side trusted the other. Both believed that survival depended upon nuclear supremacy as a deterrent to attack. While the Cold War was fought on many fronts, the Arctic became the coldest and most remote battleground for this war of nerves and economic attrition.

In 1954 the American and Canadian governments decided to build a series of radar stations across their remote northern reaches, following roughly along the sixty-ninth parallel (two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle), stretching from northern Alaska to Baffin Island, and later southern Greenland. Intended to offer early detection of a transpolar, manned bomber attack, the Distant Early Warning line had its usefulness compromised even before its completion by advances in Soviet missile technology. A number of the smaller DEW line radar stations were deactivated. By 1964, only the main stations remained operational.

One of these was the Lonely auxiliary radar station, officially designated POW-1. Located approximately one hundred miles east-southeast of Point Barrow, isolated by the Beaufort Sea on the north and low, flat, spongy tundra on the south, you could hardly find a more “lonely” outpost to fight a cold war than Lonely.

The station was finally deactivated in 1989. That is when the final battle of the Cold War began.

Cleanup. Owing to decades of supersaturation with fuel and PCBs, Lonely and not a few other relics of the Cold War are designated Superfund sites today.

It has always been one of our species’s saddest legacies in the North. Since the early whaling days, no matter what type of equipment we cart into the Arctic, a portion, reduced to refuse, has always been left behind. It costs money to get stuff above the Arctic Circle. Few budgets, including military budgets, ever include the cost of getting broken or obsolete equipment out.

It’s not for nothing that the fifty-five-gallon fuel drum has been called the “state flower of Alaska.” Their rusting remains dot the tundra.

I first learned about the DEW line when I was in grade school. The radar sites were featured, as I recall, in a publication we were given called Weekly Reader. Another time there was an article about the world’s first nuclear submarine, the USS Nautilus. It was the first submarine to cruise under the Arctic Icecap, which seemed perfectly normal since the United States was always first in everything.

Well, almost everything. Sputnik was a big surprise.

USS stood for United States ship. The Nautilus was a navy ship, and, just like the DEW line, it was something that was protecting us from the Soviet Union. I don’t know whether anyone ever told me that the people who lived way over on the far side of the Arctic were evil. But since it was certain that the United States was the best country in the world, any country that didn’t like us had to be bad, right?

At least the leaders were bad. The people were just “brainwashed.”

Interestingly enough, the animals of the Arctic didn’t seem able to distinguish between our side and their side, so they didn’t take sides. The Arctic environment is circumpolar. The snow buntings you find in Alaska are the same snow buntings you find in Siberia. In fact, some birds, most notably waterfowl, ignored Cold War boundaries entirely. Some of the black brant and snow geese that molt around Teshekpuk actually nest in Siberia.

Despite the DEW line, and the Nautilus, and the fact that the United States was the most powerful nation on Earth, we were still taught, at school, what to do just in case the Soviet Union did try to bomb us. The exercise was called a “bomb drill.” The difference between a “bomb drill” and a “fire drill” was that fire drills were sort of serious but bomb drills were way serious.

When the bell rang, we’d all push back from our desks (leaving the paper and crayons and Weekly Readers and everything else) and march, single file, into the hall, where we were instructed to sit, with our backs against the wall, hands folded over our heads and heads between our knees, then wait for the bell to ring. We weren’t allowed to talk or laugh, and the teachers were serious and stern. I concluded that what we were doing was learning to behave like school kids in the Soviet Union. If we were afraid of them, then they must know something we didn’t, like a secret judo hold or something.

We sat scrunched up for a terribly long time. Until our necks hurt and our butts went numb. I figured that what we were doing was a kind of training. When the war finally came, maybe the kids who kept their heads between their knees the longest would determine the outcome. I didn’t want to be responsible for America losing a war, since America always won its wars, so I trained real hard and didn’t complain.

We’ll never know whether my determination would have turned the tide. We never had a war. Almost. Not quite. Then, nearly fifty years after the end of World War II, the Soviet Union stopped being our enemy. They even started calling themselves the Russians again, like they did before they became evil, and everything was fine.

With the threat of nuclear attack diminished, the DEW line sites were abandoned. They became homes for duck biologists, oil geologists, and snow buntings, and this détente was not limited to Alaska, Greenland, and Canada. The Soviet Union abandoned their northern military outposts, too.

In 1997, I was able to visit one of the Soviet Cold War enclaves, a submarine base tucked into the blown-out side of an old volcano that opened to the Bering Sea. It was a large base. Much bigger than a DEW line site. Linda and I and all the passengers aboard our ship were welcome to roam at will the buildings built by the Soviet state (unlike the buildings at Lonely, which have No Trespassing and Government Property signs posted all over them).

I don’t know when the sub base was deactivated except after the end of the Cold War. Only one thing seems certain. It was abandoned very quickly. I say this because one of the buildings I entered was the school, where those other children of the Cold War were being trained. And on the desks were the crayons and papers and booklets they left behind. It was as though the bell had rung for a bomb drill. The children had filed out of the room. And never returned.

Sitting with my back against the outhouse, looking back at Lonely, I couldn’t help but wonder how long these abandoned outposts, theirs and ours, would stand, how long the Arctic would suffer their presence. Sitting about a half mile from the coast, Lonely wasn’t in any immediate danger of being erased by tide—unlike the old whaling station, which seemed destined to disappear in a year or two.

Even though these old Cold War enclaves represent history, I wonder whether it’s a history anyone cares to remember. A cold war, fought on many fronts, but most graphically perhaps metaphorically, here in the Arctic—where the scars from a war that was waged but never fought mar the landscape today.

Who won? I guess the snow buntings and the ravens and the peregrine falcons. They got the buildings.

Unless, of course, the Soviet kids who left their crayons and papers and booklets on the desks at that sub base are all still sitting somewhere with their hands over their heads and their heads between their knees, waiting for the bell.

If this is so, then my hat’s off to them. Those Soviet kids are way tougher than this American kid could ever hope to be.